As it is, he is a traditional character of the Renaissance. You will meet no graduates of his generation who do not remember in greater or less degree Bergen’s extraordinary Turkish water pipe, and his long conversations with imaginary personages in his own room, unconscious of the attentive and astonished ears of his classmates about him. And the miracle is that in the Yale of then, still smacking of the Y-sweatered bulldog ideal, he should have been universally loved and admired, in spite of eccentricity. Such tales are indeed the romance of the beginning of wisdom at Yale.
This medal, this awarded piece of gold, this honor in the eyes of the literati of each winner’s generation at Yale, has about it a glamor of remembrance, a glory peculiar to itself. It is in memory of a poet whom the Gods loved too well, and did not allow to sing his fill. By its own name it is an inspiration more precious than gold.
M. E. F.
Book Reviews
The Captain’s Doll. By D. H. Lawrence. (Thomas Seltzer.)
There is, in all living literature, a kind of between-the-lines expression of the atmosphere belonging to the described period and the described place. With the advent of literary interest in thought as well as action, the point of view peculiar to the time, the race, and the situation has been present also. To create these mysterious things by connotation from the written word, so that the reader becomes, temporarily, contemporary and incident with the characters of the story, is at least one of the essentials of a permanent novel. And while I am not at all prepared to predict permanency for The Captain’s Doll, I feel that Mr. Lawrence has been particularly happy in this strange business of evoking environmental atmosphere.
For instance, there is a moment in the first “novelette”—the volume contains three—when the German Countess-heroine and the Scotch Captain-hero are climbing a Tyrol Alp in a motorbus. The Alps and a motorbus! Everywhere, against the naked looming rocks and great glaciers, the blue sky and the blown clouds, are bulky trucks, picknickers, and “the wrong kind of rich Jews”. There are wild mosses and berry bushes among the rocks, but “the many hundreds of tourists who passed up and down did not leave much to pick”. Yet the exhilaration and the spell that belong to climbing even a civilized mountain are there; the civilized climbers get out of their lorry and feel it. The German Countess feels it in a glad, pagan abandonment: she likes the wind in her face, and she likes to see “away beyond, the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon. And the sky with curdling clouds and blue sunshine intermittent”. She “breathes deep breaths”, and says, “Wonderful, wonderful to be high up!” The English-Scot feels it, but in a different way. “His eyes were dilated with excitement that was ordeal or mystic battle rather than the Bergheil ecstacy.” He looks soulfully out, out of the world, hating the mountains for their excitement, and their “uplift” that takes him beyond himself, and he feels bigger than the mountains. All that, as Mr. Lawrence tells it, comes pretty close to “getting” these races in a phase of our era, a phase which is important because man in relation to nature is man at his best. And anyone who has climbed mountains of late years will appreciate the realism of the picture, and of the story’s atmosphere.
But I said I could not predict the future for The Captain’s Doll. To me, Mr. Lawrence seems supremely able in handling the psychology of the moment, but less effective with the dynamic psychology necessary for his drama. I am not sure his characters would act as they do; I think no others would. Through a series of individual snapshots which are real to the life, Captain Hepburn and Countess Hannele move in a manner I cannot take for granted. More decidedly I should apply this criticism to the principals in the second story, The Fox. Over time, these people are all a little queer: it is the fault in most of this “new” kind of writing.
D. G. C.